Compartment No. 6

A Finnish girl studying archeology in Moscow in the late 1980´s, leaves behind the big city, her boyfriend and the boyfriend’s mother. She desperately wants to see the ancient rock-paintings in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

She shares the train compartment with a huge Russian man in his forties, travelling with garlic and vodka in his bag. The girl is silent, the man speaks. His speech is loud and vulgar: it grows from hard experience and a grotesque view of the world. He has grown up in the streets, been in prison for murder, and is now on his way to a big construction site in Siberia.

The train lingers for a long time at many stations, sometimes more than a day. At these stops, a changing country can be seen – the Soviet Union, where ”everything is moving, snow, water, air, clouds, wind, towns, villages, people and ideas.” The girl becomes the man’s prisoner, she cannot leave the cabin, she must see and hear all about Soviet life, and soon enough experience it herself.

The trip is a nightmare, and at the same time a twisted, beautiful story. Compartment no 6 is a novel, where there is room for both joy and piercing pain in the same sentence.

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REVIEWS

”…a wonderful novel…”

–Neue Züricher Zeitung

“Rosa Liksom moves deftly between a myriad of subplots as they unfold in tandem to the novel’s central theme, in this way creating a powerful impression of the many torments that have shaped the destiny of the Russian people. Within the flowing descriptions each story lies enclosed within the next much as with Russian dolls, and the least is the most touching of all.”

– La Liberté Suisse

“The literary composition alone is worth the money, the melodic, rhythmic language, compressed, poetical and replete with fragrance and colour sensations… The girl and the man, this unlikely couple, accompany one another at the close across the plains as if progressing through a film by Andrej Tarkovskij.”

– Svenska Dagbladet

“The outcome is both atmospheric and beautiful, an elegy to the Soviet Union and its people, the land where ‘unhappiness is perceived as happiness.”

– Helsingborgs Dagblad

“All this black as night misery and despair are elevated by the writer into literature. She achieves this by means of the girl’s acute observations and sensitivity and the man’s luxuriating exaggeration and burlesque vehemence… The entire text is saturated with marked sensuality: the taste of buckwheat porridge, beetroots and rancid fat. And the human smells of sweat, fusel alcohol and poverty… And thus ‘Hytti no 6’ becomes a remarkable little book.”

– Göteborgs-Posten

“The wild stories of the rough fellow passenger make this journey increasingly absurd, giddying and captivating… It is a stroke of genius to describe a country and give form to one’s mixed feelings for it through such a figure. To me, he is the incarnation of the human factor, which means that reason can never prevail, neither in planned nor in Capitalist economies.”

– Aftonbladet

“Liksom is a master of controlled exaggeration. With a couple of carefully chosen brushstrokes, a mini-story, she is able to conjure up an entire human destiny.” .

– From the motivation for the Finlandia Prize

“The most fascinating thing about this short novel is Rosa Liksom’s masterly ability to visualise life and landscape. She is an artist, after all, and the imagery in the book is often very surprising and always loaded with meaning.”

Siri Lindgren

Johanna Kinch

Magdalena Hedlund

about

The Hedlund Literary Agency was established in March 2011 by Magdalena Hedlund.

The company’s focus is general fiction, crime and thrillers while also representing a few, selected authors of children's books. The agency's principal area of expertise is selling Swedish translation and film rights to works by some of Scandinavia's most highly acclaimed authors. In particular, it represents Moggliden, the company of the Stieg Larsson Estate.